


sepulcher.

by waterdeaths



Series: born to a childless age [3]
Category: Naruto
Genre: Animal Death, Gen, first kill
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-06
Updated: 2018-12-06
Packaged: 2019-09-12 15:22:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 590
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16875321
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/waterdeaths/pseuds/waterdeaths
Summary: The sixth man Haku kills is the first life he's taken intentionally.





	sepulcher.

The sixth man Haku kills is also the first life he takes intentionally.

The shallow breaths sucked in between his teeth taste hard and sharp like the edge of a kunai. The man had smelled of fever sweat and night terrors, tinged with the pale odor of hemp rope and cold meat. A missing nin from iwa with a bounty on his head hefty enough for him to know better than to tarry long in a country where sons murder mothers for the right price. Someone alerted him to their pursuit and he’d rushed from the heart of Water Country toward the sea-side furthest from the village. From there he’d planned to bribe a fisherman to cart him over into the Land of Sea, murder the fisherman, then dissipate as tracelessly as the mist. Might’ve made it, too, had he not stopped for water in a waste town with poisoned wells and had his body wracked with dysentery, fever.

They track him to a town several miles from the coast. The initial set of prints are little more than pale depressions in the mud, but the second set of tracks grow heavier and clumsier with every yard traveled. By the time they reach the front door of the hut the footsteps have transformed into a deep furrow through the mud. He'd had to drag himself the rest of the way.

Zabuza glances back at the town well, then Haku, who nods. They'll finish what water they had and stock up elsewhere once the job was done.

Zabuza knocks in the tattered thatch door of the vacant hut with a shoulder shove, Haku slipping past him to slide into the shadows as practiced. The one-room hut is cramped and filthy, thick with body oils and a powerful fecal stench. Haku pulls the edge of his robe over his nose, breathing as quietly as possible through his mouth.

Deep in the fouled darkness lay the man, his body and face knotted up like a rope, clothing soiled with feces and sweat. He does not stir until Haku is already looming over him. Then he cracks an eye, stares up at the bare kunai tucked against Haku's bird wrist, and smiles.

Zabuza says nothing, but his gaze bears down on the back of Haku's neck, a calloused hand taking him by the scruff and tossing him forward. _Go._

Haku obeys.

Kneeling beside the man, Haku carefully fists his fingers in the man’s matted hair, pulls it firmly back at the angle zabuza had forced him to practice again and again and again to expose the man’s damp, beaded neck. The man’s eyes are beginning to loll, growing jaundiced and unfocused as a rabid dog. When haku lays the kunai against his jugular he hiccups, burbles a wet, painful gasp. Haku thinks of his parents. How they’d taught him to catch and skin rabbits, to kill them quickly and mercifully, if only to silence their human screams.

_This is duty,_ a voice inside him whispers as the blade draws back, beginning to dig, _This is love. This is loyalty. This is mercy –_

As the man’s throat opens up into a smile, so, too, does something tucked away in the deep dark quiet of Haku's mind, something that speaks with a voice too warm and soft and gentle, _No, no. What this is is_ **familiar**.

( Later, when Haku dreams of fistfuls of rabbit fur and a wail that won't be cut, the fur turns to muddy hair beneath his fingertips. Still, he does not cry. )


End file.
